The world

is controlled
by people
so important
they do not exist.

The silence of onlookers

is the sound of shame.

* Contemporary Poetry

(to Paul Muldoon et mult.al.)

A wave of treated
toxins, chlorinated turds
in a slimy sea
of over-considered
words.


*(in the English language)

Non-penetrative sex

is to the cruder kind
as Dhrupad is to Opera.

[Dhrupad is the most contemplative form of Indian Classical music,
usually sung (in solo or duet) by deep male voices,
but also played on the most contemplative instrument,
the Rudhra Vina.
A single Rag can take several hours to perform.]

When death

is penultimate
integrity,
grieving is
another kind of vanity.

Though all prisoners

are political

the true anarchist
is not.

A Place to Rest

The other day I hired a grave
@ 9 euros a year for
the minimum 30 years.

It is in a beautiful, secluded,
empty corner of the graveyard
with a splendid view across
the river to the village.

Others seem to want to rot
in the open, in full sun,
but I prefer my shady Vampire Corner
where I have planted hellebore,
heather, periwinkles, costmary
and wild garlic - though not
because I think the last-named
will be necessary.

Heaven

for dog-lovers is full of dogs
for racists has no people of color
for control-freaks is a gulag
      of their very own in the sky
for Jews contains no Gentiles
for Muslims is full of virgins
      for whom there is no competition
for cats is full of mice and small
      endangered, feathered species
for me is gloriously null eternity

'Embedded Water'

It takes 130 pints of water
to grow the food and process it
to make a pint of beer.

A cup of coffee "embeds" 140 litres
of water, a cotton T-shirt 2,000 litres,

and 15,000 litres of water (plus
a lot of drugs, husbandry and transport) make
just one kilogram of steak...
for necrophagy's sake!

Words and the World

interweave
and unravel
each other.

Application of Intelligence

It requires only the slightest shift
of mind, and modest application,
to turn oneself
from sexually-deficient
to sexually self-sufficient.

Women of the World,

unite!
For the men are
faking it
too
-and don't even know
that they're faking it.

NASA

is now working on the logistics
of using the dark side of the moon
as a dump for nuclear waste,

and how to make Mars
habitable for colonising
members of our species
- which is so good at
cherishing planets.

Make haste! O make haste!

Deuteronomy & Leviticus

Every Christianity
is à la carte
pick 'n' mix doctrine
and morality.

(see Comment for amplification)

What the Cat said

Curiosity killed
the planet.

Sexual jealousy

and capitalism:
if you love the latter
you revel in the former.

When I come to think about it,

'high' culture
is only a little less trivial
than the 'low' variety.

The best future

is none.

(Brevity
is the soul of
levity.)

Arthritis :

an old dog chews on
an older bone

Mystery

is the natural order of things
which the vanity of our curiosity
imperils with such impertinence.

'What is important'

said the great heterosexual chansonnier,
Georges Brassens, 'is the sum total of affection,
tenderness and fellow-feeling
that a man can offer another.'

We have the arrogance

to think we're more than
animals ruled by appetites.
But our appetites have become
ingeniously multifarious

and our reason is their
pathetic slave.

Truth

invented by humans,
exists only in laughter.

Our skins

feel like
the skins of snakes.
We are one of only two
mammals without fur.

This evolutionary
accident was our
Original Sin.

At the deepest level

of civilisation:
prison.

Optimism's ruthless,

unremitting rays
glare out from almost every human act
and scorch the Earth

which merely adds
to hubristic humanity's self-praise.

POLICE SAY

(a found poem)

Police say 28-year-old Anthony Coffman
walked into the Jay C. Foodstore,
pulled out a hunting knife
and attacked packages of hamburgers.

When an employee tried to stop him,
police say Coffman lunged at the man
with the hunting knife.

"He told people at the store
that God had sent him there to do that.
And he was trying to save young girls from the beef,"
said Deputy Police Chief David Lutz.

Coffman is charged with criminal mischief,
and criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon.

Kiss Bomb Outrage

no soldiers hurt.

Integrity

is as painful as truth.
Even as a backward youth
on a backward-looking island
I realised that pain may be
the only path to integrity.

THE ROAD HARDLY-EVER TAKEN

This path leads
to no destination.
The others lead to death.

My life

is as of a naked boy
at a masked ball.
But I am very strong.

O planets! O galaxies!

Beyond pain
and happiness
I will soon be dust
and infinite again.

THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE

- A MORE-OR-LESS FOUND POEM

A Russian (said to be the World's Cleverest Man)
has turned down a million-dollar prize
for solving one of mathematics' toughest puzzles.

Dr Grigori Perelman, 44,
who lives as a recluse with his mother
in a small flat on a run-down housing-estate
in outer St Petersburg, said through the closed door:
"I have all I want."
She said: "We don't want to talk to anyone."

They both share her $75-a-month pension
because he has been unemployed since 2006.

The Millennium Prize was given in 2006
by the Clay Mathematics Institute
for his solution of the Poincaré Conjecture, posed in 1904.


Dr Perelman openly e-mailed his solution in 2002,
but failed to turn up to receive his prestigious Fields Medal
(equivalent to a Nobel Prize)
from the International Mathematical Union
in Madrid four years ago.

At the time he stated:
"I'm not interested in money or fame.
I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.

"I'm not a hero of mathematics.
I'm not even that successful.
That's why I don't want to have everybody looking at me.

"If the proof is correct then no further recognition is needed.

"I do not think anything that I say can be
of the slightest public interest."

Neighbour Vera Petrovna said:
"I was once in his flat and I was astounded.
He only has a table, a stool and a bed with a dirty mattress
which was left by previous owners:
alcoholics who sold the flat to him.

"We are trying to get rid of cockroaches in our block,
but they hide in his flat."

Dr Perelman once said to an American journalist:
"...there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest.
But almost all of them are conformists."

"He is someone who sees the world a little bit in black and white,"
said Marcus Du Sautoy, Oxford University's Professor
for the Public Understanding of Science - who obviously
has little understanding of morality, let alone meta-morality.

Dr Perelman is also a talented violinist.
His sister lives in Stockholm.
She, too, an eminent mathematician.

In March 2010, it was announced that he was the first person
to meet the criteria for
the Clay Mathematical Institute's Millennium Prize,
also worth one million dollars, but that he had declined it, too.
No-one else has been offered one of these prizes.

The Poincaré Conjecture was more than 100 years old
when Dr Perelman solved it
- and could help determine the shape of the universe.

Miracles

To turn water into wine
is only to add consumer value
or to disinfect.

But to have turned wine into water
would have avoided
unimaginable slaughter.

Reason enhances acquisition.

So we fall victim to acquisitive rationalism,
which can be fought only by reason,
since reason solipsistically and compulsively sabotages
intuition, sensibility, mystery and reverence.

This is why quasi-rational narrative
has swamped Western culture in general
and poetry in particular.

Youth is rarely wasted

but the rest of life often is.

Religion shrinks

the mind and the heart
- but not, alas, the penis.

Whitey wishes he were black

I am the indecent colour of dying,
a shame-shifted corpse
of beige-pink-blue-gray -
the ku-klux shade of ambition and lying.
The taste of my heart is the taste of dismay.

Time's Streamers

Between the sleeping and the waking
Between my genes and my vasectomy
Between misgiving and mistaking
Between occlusion and dormition
out from a floating ocean
a floating river flows through me
to the transcendent not-to-be

Capitalism

In Poppy Adams' The Behaviour of Moths there is a fine description of an ants' nest, to which ants work frantically to bring pieces of neatly-cut leaf - not to their own larvæ but to a big, bulbous grub which has hacked into and commandeered the ants' communication system.

As it gets even bigger it eats the ants' neglected or dead larvæ, too,
then commands the ants to bear it in a procession to another nest where it will continue its development.

Thus is capitalism.

DORA'S BOX

The most insidious ill is success,
and here's the paradox:
though now pandemic it cannot be infectious.

When push

comes to shove,
a right
is only a rite.

Pipeninsulipsistic

So much of
men's talk is
tail-trail
of lost peacocks.

The gap between the spheres

is the great consciousness between
truth and fiction
sleeping and waking
singing and talking
art and science
imagination and insight
sex and gender
love and happiness
inspiration and expiration
death and glory
desires and terrors
the left brain and the right -

is the universe
of unseen mirrors.

Art

can teach us very little
but animals almost everything.

Homo sapiens sapiens, never knowingly reasonable

My critique of Reason
is that it is rarely pure -
simply because pure reason
can rubbish the extreme cunning
that we parade under the name
of intelligence.

CERN

Stupid scientists
ask how the Universe began
- but not exactly where
their food comes from...

and so it goes,.

SCIENCE

is a cul-de-sac :
Theseus and the Minotaur.

Religion is the best excuse
for enmity and war.

The most malignant disease

is success.

Though epidemic,
it is not infectious.

More

lessness -
please,
please...